I shut my eyes and felt a new presence like a rush of wind. She was there—here—for me, as she had been one long-ago day in Vermont when she’d stormed into my apartment in her mud-season boots and stood over my body curled with fear and grief on my futon and told me that she was taking me home. My mother. Only it wasn’t my mother alone. It was also Janis, summoning me back to Los Angeles, gripping my arm in the LAAC parking lot. It was Yegina, urging me to write Brenae’s story anyway. It was Brenae, standing at the blue pool edge, her face wet, tape ripped away from her mouth, gasping for breath. Brenae was also inside me, mothering me. Picking me up, setting me forward. Insisting I go on. Saying Just up there, it’s right up there, just twenty, then nineteen, then eighteen, seventeen, sixteen breaths. Go on. You’ll make it. I fumbled over the foam, no longer caring about my cut hands, my aching lungs, my streaming eyes. I halted a dozen feet later and began ripping at the insulation below me, then kicking my foot through, frantic, pummeling. The sheetrock dented, dented, broke, and I fell into an arch, into a nave of shoes, tearing the arch down with me, sneakers, sandals, loafers, and pumps, flying apart as they tumbled, as if their hundreds of invisible owners were bursting away in all directions. I hit the floor. The cathedral above sagged and broke. Clattering, the shoes fell after me, around me; they rained.

26

TWO DAYS LATER, I SAT with Alicia Ruiz in the garden courtyard of the hospital. Sprays of palmetto and thick succulents surrounded us. The garden was tucked on the fifth floor between two towering wards. It didn’t feel like a garden. It felt more like a secret, airlifted jungle with a concrete floor. There was nothing to do out here but sit in the shallow shade and slightly fresh air, trying to pretend that waiting through Ray’s surgery was restful instead of nerve-racking. A smog-white sky spread above us.

Ray had a broken clavicle, a fractured scapula, cracked ribs, and lacerations to his right lung. For forty-eight hours, the doctors had stabilized him with IV fluids, a sling for his shoulder, and a tube to help him breathe. He looked like a car-crash victim being slowly strangled by translucent vines. Ray’s “high injury severity” score made two surgeons recommend surgery for his scapula, to put pins in, helping the damage heal faster and easier. A third countered the idea, citing potential long-term nerve damage to Ray’s arm. Ray chose the majority view, and now he was under anesthesia and we were waiting.